Modernist Communities

The aim of this two-day conference is to foster discussion on communities in the modernist period. As discursive constructs and historical practices, communities constitute a privileged phenomenon from which to understand the political and ethical regime of modernist texts, as well as the actual forms of collective experience in which writers and readers were involved. More than a decade after Jessica Berman’s landmark work on "the politics of community" in modernist fiction, we seek to explore the various ways in which communities were configured across genres and artistic media, but also to acknowledge the grounds of their historical and cultural specificity. We hope that this will lead us to distinguish various versions of the communal, from the ideal to the empirical, from the utopian to the everyday, from consensus to dissensus.